Josh Marshall has posted a Fox News clip in which National Review Online's Jerry Bowyer tells Neil Cavuto that the United Kingdom's state-run health care system has made them vulnerable to terrorist infiltration:
In a followup post, he asks for details about Bowyer:
Can anyone tell me more about Jerry Bowyer from National Review Online? He's the guy in the video below who went on Fox today and chatted with Neil Cavuto about how having a single payer health care system will make us more vulnerable to terrorism. Where do they find these guys? Did I just not watch Fox closely enough in the past?
Is he on these shows a lot? Has anyone heard this argument before?
Since I've written quite a bit about Bowyer over the last few years, here are some excerpts from my posts on him, which show that he is, um, analytically challenged:
Supply-side nonsense from Jerry Bowyer (5/15/07)In his latest effort, Bowyer once again claims that the Laffer curve has been vindicated and that tax cuts increase revenue, a claim that even Bush economists disavow...
...Note what's missing from Bowyer's account: the 2001 tax cut. Like the Treasury Department and the Wall Street Journal, Bowyer is cheating by focusing only on the period after the second Bush tax cut. That's the great thing about cutting taxes repeatedly: when the economy picks up, you just point to the most recent tax cut and take credit.
More fundamentally, if tax cuts increased revenue, why is per capita revenue growth near zero since 2001 after adjusting for inflation? Bowyer's cherry-picked data tell us nothing.
Jerry Bowyer's misleading media bias claim (4/25/07)
...In a column today on NRO Financial, Jerry Bowyer, a conservative columnist/radio host/investment adviser, blames media bias for the lack of coverage of current levels of black unemployment under President Bush...
...The problem is that Bowyer is comparing apples to oranges -- he's juxtaposing 8.3 percent unemployment in a single month under President Bush with the "average rate achieved during President Bill Clinton's second term." In fact, black unemployment dropped all the way to 7.3 percent during Clinton's second term, and the average of Clinton's second term was lower than the average under Bush.
Bad economics at National Review (6/21/06)
...To support these meaningless data -- what does the combined net worth of all US households and nonprofits mean? -- Bowyer offers what might be the most useless bar chart ever created:
Bowyer's chart has three primary flaws: (1) it combines Bill Gates with homeless people and everyone in between, giving us no sense of how middle class or poor families are doing; (2) it lumps together nonprofits and households; (3) it gives us no sense of how household net worth has changed over time. The first flaw is analogous to President Bush using "average" tax cut statistics that are skewed upward by high-income individuals...
What is Jerry Bowyer talking about? (7/12/05)
...He writes that "states that went for George W. Bush in the last election are considerably poorer than the ones that went for Kerry. The notion that the GOP is the party of the rich simply doesn't match the economic reality."
But you can't make reliable inferences about individual behavior from aggregate data; this is what is known as the "ecological fallacy". And the obvious counterpoint to Bowyer is that the bivariate correlations between party and income are pretty clear...
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